The project Not for the Likes of Me encourages companies to think about using places besides theatres to connect with potential audiences.
Photograph: Alamy

For some time I’ve held the view that making theatre is, in some ways, the easy bit. The real challenge is in getting an audience for that work. As if to illustrate this point, it disconcerts me that the first three of the Arts Council’s ambitions are described separately: 1) supporting artists, 2) building audiences, 3) creating resilience. It seems obvious that it is only in better connecting the first two of these that we will achieve the third. (You could argue that most plans to achieve resilience without looking at improving the quality, size and breadth of the audience will be nothing more than a sticking plaster to disguise our failure to be relevant.)

At the same time I have always rejected what might be described as the “gateway” notion of audience development – that audiences are “taken on a journey” from soft, crowd-pleasing shows to seriously dense text and opera. Surely good art is good and bad art, bad. Indeed shouldn’t good art be work that is both contemporary and popular, accessible and complex? Equally, is it really useful to think of art as high or low or to see local as the opposite of international?

When the opportunity arose to work with Arts Partnership Surrey – a collaboration of the nine boroughs and the county of Surrey – on a project designed to test a new idea, it felt like a gift to trial some of these propositions. What quickly became apparent is that the local authority officers share our ambition to find ways of increasing the perceived “usefulness” of the arts and asking: if the regular audience to theatre comprises only 8% of the population, what might the other 92% be interested in?

Too much energy is put into generating new work rather than making better use of the best work already created

Which is where Not for the Likes of Me, a project which we are running out of Farnham Maltings, comes in. It has a simple ambition: to encourage companies to think more consciously about who their audience might be and how they might reach them; to think about using places besides theatres and black box studios to connect with potential audiences, perhaps working outside or with a particular community. We have said that we are as interested in a company taking an existing piece of their work and considering how they might “re-contextualise” it as starting with a new idea. This is born from our collective view that far too much energy is put into generating new work rather than making better use of the best work already created. There is nothing new in this – we just want to recognise the value of the artist to attract an audience rather than treating them as slots in a programme.

We had more than 80 initial statements of interest in the opportunity to work with us – described as a £37,000 investment towards rehearsal or re-rehearsal time and an initial 15-date tour across the county. We have been hugely encouraged by the range of ambitions from companies who want to work with particular communities and groups (such as the under-fives, people with dementia, Travellers, and mothers and daughters) and in particular places such as sports centres, prisons, fish and chip shops and village fetes.

From these, eight will be awarded £250 to express the idea more fully, describe how they might deliver the project and the scope of a budget; and then three or four will meet with the partners to choose one idea to be realised next year.

Of course I hope that once a company has an idea they will feel compelled to make it. We will certainly look for other opportunities to make more of the proposals happen. There will always be the moment when an artist will come up with a compelling idea that, for all its madness, demands to be made. I am firmly of the view that artists, given the opportunity, will help us rediscover our value to audiences. We shall see.